Joint EHR Costs Skyrocketed To $28 Billion, DoD Says

Physicians spending a paltry twenty or thirty thousand dollars on their EHR implementations can take comfort in the fact that they don’t have to foot the bill for the recently abandoned joint VA-DoD EHR system, which would have cost the taxpayers $28 billion, according to Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense for acquisitions.  In testimony before Congress this week, Kendall reaffirmed the new direction of the military health record program, stating that the DoD and the VA will be pursuing separate but interoperable solutions.

The Department of Defense decided to pursue customized commercial options instead of adopting the VA’s popular VistA EHR in May.  “It is crucial to note that a seamlessly integrated and interoperable electronic health record with full data exchange and read/write capability can be achieved without DoD and VA operating a single healthcare management software system,” Kendall told the House Armed Services Committee and the House Veterans Affairs Committee in a prepared statement. [...]